California became the first state in the nation to prohibit four food additives found in popular cereal, soda, candy and drinks after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a ban on them Saturday.
The California Food Safety Act will ban the manufacture, sale or distribution of brominated vegetable oil, potassium bromate, propylparaben and red dye No. 3 — potentially affecting 12,000 products that use those substances, according to the Environmental Working Group.
The legislation was popularly known as the “Skittles ban” because an earlier version also targeted titanium dioxide, used as a coloring agent in candies including Skittles, Starburst and Sour Patch Kids, according to the Environmental Working Group. But the measure, Assembly Bill 418, was amended in September to remove mention of the substance.
Ahhh but I don’t have enough cancer yet :( On a serious note, sometimes people shit talk California but they have a massive economy and when they do things like this it has a huge positive benefit for the entire country. Most companies will just reformulate instead of having California specific products so everyone benefits.
To me this is amazing news, I am allergic to Red Dye #3. If I eat something that has it, within seconds my throat closes and I can barely breathe. The worst part is that there is no need to use it. Sweet Tarts for example uses beets to get the red coloring in their candy.
Well that’s terrifying. If you don’t live in California you’ll still have to watch for it after the law takes affect but it should be used a lot less.
Most brands will reformulate and all their products will be compliant rather than making a California only version and a rest of the us version. They aren’t going to just stop serving California either, it’s the largest economy in the nation and if it was on its own it would be roughly equivalent to Germany gdp wise
Do these cause cancer in the usage and quantity they are consumed in?
Or is this more California “everything causes cancer” BS?
The FDA banned the use of Red Dye #3 in cosmetics over 30 years ago because it causes cancer in animal models. But it was never banned in food. That is either beholden to big business, downright stupid, or both. More info here: https://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-additives/red-dye-3-banned-in-cosmetics-but-still-allowed-in-food-a3467381365/
That is either beholden to big business, downright stupid, or both.
If yoyu want an even more blatant example of this, look into the history of stevia and the FDA. Which includes fun stuff like the FDA burning crates of herbal tea because that tea contained stevia, declaring it an unsafe food additive seemingly entirely because NutraSweet wanted them to, and not that much later creating rules that allowed it to be sold to any one in any quantity for any reason as an “herbal dietary supplement”, but only so long as you didn’t mention that it had a flavor. Mentioning that it was sweet tasting transformed it from an herbal dietary supplement that’s basically harmless into a dangerous unsafe food additive.
It’s really a damning indictment of our society that we put cancerous materials in everything and then blame the people making us aware of that, not the ones deciding to give us cancer.
Not everything causes cancer, but they’ll use the cancer causing shit if it’s cheap, is the actual lesson. Not fuck hippies or whatever you’re on about.
Kinda weird this has to be done at the bill level, there isn’t a health agency that monitors these things and bans as necessary?
There is, but banning these substances is a political process not a scientific one. It’s definitely true that this should be done by experts and not politicians.
The thing is that it’s impossible to set up an experiment to show that something is safe. All you can do is collect more evidence that something is not dangerous. This leads to GRAS.
There’s also the additional fact that the dosage makes the poison. There is no substance for which a single molecule can harm you meaningfully.
Roundup is about as toxic as tablesalt. Caffeine is vastly more toxic than that. And Tylenol, well, that simply wouldn’t be approved if it were invented today. The ratio between the therapeutic dose and the lethal dose is too small.
Then there’s tradition and utility.
Plenty of herbal supplements and even foods are quite dangerous but are sold because they always were and they are “natural”.
We can all agree that certain substances don’t belong in food - either because they are useless or there’s strong evidence they’re harmful.
It’s the useful ones for which there is some evidence that they may cause issues when given in extreme doses, but a vast number of substances exhibit that behavior. Caffeine and Tylenol, for example. You do not think of these as poisons, but they are. Caffeine is so dangerous that you have to go through a lot of trouble to get it in its pure form.
The fact is that those supstances are certainly more dangerous than the substances in the article, but people are not clamoring to ban them.
And all this complexity is before people’s individual interests are involved.
This is why when you compare, say, us and eu food regulations you find substances that are on one list and not the other. One is not a superset of the other.
Anyway, these substances are not “toxic” in really any correct usage of the term, and it’s probably very unlikely that a ban will make anyone healthier or happier, despite what you may read about when you Google these substances. Even if you go to the scientific level.
Scientists can have their own agenda. They’re still people. Or they can just be bad scientists. Or they can just be churning out papers as fast as possible to increase their prestige.
It used to be that the top paper that came up (it may still be up in the list) when you search glyphosate and bees was a bad paper. It did correctly conclude that glyphosate killed the bees when they put it in the honey, but they had to put so much in there in order to see any effect at all that the concentration was high enough to actually kill aquatic weeds. Next it wasn’t properly controlled. Do you know what else will kill bees if put it in their honey? Water. And most definitely caffeine. I assure you a very small amount of caffeine in honey will kill a nest.
It’s just a political thing with good optics because who can argue with banning a “toxic” substance.
There is no substance for which a single molecule can harm you meaningfully.
Prions would like a word.
Awesome! Glad to have this added to the conversation.
I actually had this thought and was thinking about adding something like this earlier today.
You’re technically correct, in a sense. There still needs to be lots of these to cause problems. If there aren’t lots, there’s no problem.
It would be the same for any self replicating thing. Bacteria, viruses, fungi, and prions, but they replicate. I will grant you a single large parasite could do this, but at that point, we’re talking about tigers and such as a technicality as well.
Potentially one of these things could cause problems by reproducing. I think it’s just unlikely. I don’t know how we could demonstrate that though. I imagine a single virus or bacterium can lead to disease. I just suspect the probability is low.
Like you, my first thought was prions, but they have to actually come into contact with the protein to catalyze its misfolding. That’d be rare in the protein soup, I suppose.
Anyway. Nice comment!
Roundup is about as toxic as tablesalt
there’s a medium artificial with the same title if anyone is interested. (1 minute google search)
For sure, a must read. The OP who referred to it, clearly didn’t. Not you, Hello Hotel, thanks for the link.
Are bees typically used to find the toxicity of a substance for humans? I thought that was rats or something.
Scientists can have their own agenda. They’re still people. Or they can just be bad scientists. Or they can just be churning out papers as fast as possible to increase their prestige.
It’s interesting to me, that if you had said this exact phrase in relation to climate change research, or any other politically divisive science, you would have been down voted to oblivion, but when talking about this, you got up voted. What you’ve written here is true regardless of the subject matter, but when it comes to agendas, it’s even more true in politically divisive science.
Yeah… I’m fine being a liberal, but this place is toxic.
I’m not sure how much longer I’ll tolerate it.
It’s just too many angry, ignorant people unwilling to accept challenges to their beliefs.
Just because your beliefs are left wing doesn’t mean you shouldn’t question them.
There is the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) and normally that’s their purview, but they’re probably a bit more lax and industry-friendly, so more likely to let that stuff slide. California is a bit more progressive and health-conscious, and they’re a big enough market that when they say they’re gonna ban something, it essentially becomes banned for everybody else. Businesses won’t develop CA and non-CA products, they’ll just rework whatever it is to conform with CA’s demands.
The FDA did step in I believe when states starting talking about introducing different labeling standards and having different requirements for what needed to be called out, because it would’ve turned into a nightmare if you had to manage 50 different sets of labeling requirements.
If the FDA let’s industry produce toxic food that gives people cancer then I’d argue that the FDA is useless.
It’s just a other agency that is paid off by corporations to look the other way so they can continue exploiting Americans for massive gains.
The FDA was created to enforce standards of sanitation and prevent false advertising in medicine (e.g. snake oil). The whole, “banning toxic additives” came later after science started understanding physiological dependence and addictive substances (e.g. actual coke in Coca-Cola).
Really, the FDA is an evolution of a lot of preceding government bodies and there’s a lot of history involved that they don’t cover in school 🤷
Any state health agency would fall under the executive branch of government. The power of creating laws is under the legislative branch (like the Senate). Executive agencies have the authority to enforce laws and under Chevron Deference the authority to interpret laws where vague, but not form new laws.
For example, if a bill was passed saying cars can’t be louder than 110 dBs an executive agency could decide the proper way of measuring volume, if not prescribed by law.
I believe the executive branch can suggest new laws, but they would still have to pass through the state’s legislative branch. The suggested law may still need to be formally introduced by a member of the legislative branch, though.
The legislative process of each state is largely derived from the legislative process of the federal government, but there are probably some variations between states.
I’d think the Legislative would set up a health agency empowered to ban “toxic food additives”, and let the agency determine which ones are toxic. Otherwise, the Legislative branch has to ban every individual thing.
the fact that its
… “toxic” food additives
and not
… “toxic food additives”
makes me think the one who made the title inserted their opinions.
Isn’t this standard procedure for blogs/journalism? I thought the quotes are used to imply a term is not being used because the author thinks it’s true, but rather to indicate that that’s what the topic is centered on.
Since the article didn’t list many examples, I looked them up.
brominated vegetable oil- used in sodas, usually citrus flavored ones
potassium bromate- look out for this in breads
propylparaben- used in packaged baked goods, mostly pastries and tortillas
red dye No. 3- aka Erythrosine, its a pink dye, so watch out for that ingredient in any pink foods
and lastly to cover all bases:
titanium dioxide- its a white dye, so watch out for that ingredient in any white foods
brominated vegetable oil - it’s found in citrus sodas because the (natural) citrus flavoring is an oil, an orange or citrus oil of some type, and is prone to separating if there’s not a way to keep is suspended in water. And I’ve seen separated sodas in a QA testing lab and they look pretty nasty. I imagine orange sodas that haven’t already reformulated will have to, so they might end up tasting different. I know orange Gatorade reformulated to get rid of BVO about 10 years ago or more. https://www.fda.gov/food/food-additives-petitions/brominated-vegetable-oil-bvo
As a note, California also forced (by being one of the largest markets) reformulation of dark sodas containing caramel color across the nation. Caramel color is what happens when you brown toast or caramelize sugar. I kinda just scratched my head because it seems you’ll get more exposure to the carcinogen they’re talking about if you burn your toast. https://www.fda.gov/food/food-additives-petitions/questions-answers-about-4-mei . And if burned baked goods were a genuine problem, it seems we would’ve known it long before now.
I think most industries definitely need more regulation, but California sometimes seems to do banning so often on the slightest sliver of data, and it kinda creates a regulatory “crying wolf” situation, where people become so used to the “known to cause cancer in California” warnings that they start to ignore ALL of them and can’t differentiate the ones that are dead fucking serious and the ones that honestly require unusual situations for it to happen like someone eating/consuming a physically unlikely amount of the product constantly.
I personally think it’s a problem when people don’t have a way to differentiate the warnings about things that’ll genuinely fuck you up under current levels of exposure, and things you basically have to go dip yourself in a vat of daily for months before it harms you.
And I think it’s a problem because people naturally have short attention spans, and when EVERYTHING has a warning, you know people aren’t going to actually do research to figure out which one is dead serious and which is fluffed up and starting at shadows. So you start to get inconsistent heeding of the warnings. Eventually you’ll ignore the boy crying wolf because you’re so tired of going to to check if the wolf is there, and the wolf’ll come eat you then.
I have no solutions for solving it though, given how polarized things are (one side massively under-regulating, and the other sometimes starting at shadows) and how few people are willing to listen to nuance.
A reason you don’t see those warning labels as often today as 20 years ago is that a pattern has emerged of:
-
California bans or labels something
-
biggest companies change it to avoid ban/label
3.US implements a national regulation to match California (since the big companies have already complied anyway)
- Labels no longer necessary
As someone with a chemistry background it’s a real pet peeve of mine when people fearmonger about benign chemicals or go “if I can’t pronounce it then it shouldn’t be in my food!” And it helps absolutely no one that there are cases where the FDA bends to the industry.
If you asked me if I’d rather soak my exposed hands in benzene for an hour, or eat food with any of these now banned products, I would instantly pick the food without question. The public isn’t necessarily aware that some things are far more carcinogenic than others.
And to add to that, we’ve got things which cause harm because of their physical properties, not chemical. All particulate matter is horrible for our lungs and can cause cancer and permanent damage, but the matter itself could be totally benign. It’s why even nicotine free cigarettes cause some harm – all smokes have suspended particulate matter. It’s a concern with vaping that metal nanoparticles might be generated too.
I know I’m preaching to the choir here. We just don’t have the public education nor warnings necessary to actually represent these things accurately.
I’m not sure theblack of research is because people have short attention spans. I think there just isn’t time in the day. I have to research every ingredient in everything that I eat, what companies are actually nestle brands to avoid those, but wait what browser can I use to research them because some have privacy concerns, etc. It becomes a giant rabbit hole that people don’t have time for even if they have the world’s longest attention span.
For anyone interested in trying to avoid bad stuff, there’s this free app called Yuka I’ve been using for a year or so now where you can scan foods and other products and it gives them a score and a comprehensive breakdown of the additives and overall health of the food with linked sources.
I have this app too. It’s depressing how many foods I actually enjoy have additives in them.
All processed foods have additives for taste, shelf life or looks. Even if they aren’t listed on the ingredient breakdown because they are classified as “manufacturing aids”, a loop hole that the food industry created for themselves.
Free… With limits. Charging a $10 subscription to use a search function is disgusting.
Consider the resources it takes to maintain, update, and query a large amount data, the $99 yearly app store fee, development of the app, and plain usefulness of it. That seems pretty generous to me, especially with how much is free to use.
